Saddam Hussein's Zabiba and the King was the first book in my library of dictator literature. I got it for Christmas 2004 – after the fall of the Ba'athist regime, but before the big man swung from the gallows. The cover reflects this: a panicked, bearded Saddam stares out at the reader, heavy bags under his eyes. Who, me torture and murder opponents? Nah – you're thinking of another Saddam, the guy with the military moustache.
It's a strange choice of image, since Zabiba was first published three years before the second Iraq war, when Saddam was still in power and creating an edition of the Qu'ran written in his own blood. I wasn't even sure I'd include Zabiba in this series, since second-division dictators like Saddam tend to lose the public's interest upon exiting the world-historical stage. But Sacha Baron Cohen is planning a film adaptation, and as his commercial instincts are far stronger than mine, I decided to take the plunge.
The story begins promisingly enough, or at least more promisingly than most works of Dictator Lit, by deploying the story within a story device familiar to readers of The Arabian Nights. In this instance it is a grandmother who is spinning yarns. Alas, Grandma likes nothing more than to crank out dull dialogues on leadership and sacrifice, albeit dressed up as a romance story between a commoner and a king in ancient Iraq. But soon, Grandma is displaced entirely by political blather, and only briefly reappears late on in the proceedings.
So forget Grandma. The core of the novel is: each night, Muslim Zabiba visits the pagan King in his palace. However, rather than commit outrages upon Zabiba's succulent body, the King prefers to listen to long discourses on how to run a country ("You need to become a living particle of the people, its conscience, thoughts and deed ... ") which, for an absolute monarch, he takes remarkably well.
It rapidly becomes apparent that the Zabiba-King relationship functions as a torturously extended metaphor for the relationship between the People and the Ruler. Eventually however, the King's love for Zabiba's brilliant mind kindles the fire of physical passion; alas, she was long ago married off to a crude metaphor for the US who is fond of orgies, money and violence. Hoping to put an end to Zabiba's relationship with the King by shaming her, Mr Metaphorical US (not his actual name) disguises himself and rapes his wife as she walks home one night. But the King loves Zabiba so much that he forgets the whole tribal honour/shame thing and declares war on America. Some of the most perfunctory battle scenes in the history of book writing follow. Zabiba leads an army into battle. She dies, hailing Arab nationalism. Zabiba's husband is killed; the victors stone his corpse. The King is mortally wounded. Then a bizarre epilogue erupts in which the victors talk at length about liberation from foreigners and how they don't want kings any more. The King dies. And that's the end of the story.
Some critics have suggested that Zabiba and the King was ghostwritten. I doubt that: it is so poorly structured and dull that it has the whiff of dictatorial authenticity. Unlike the works of Colonel Gaddafi or Kim Jong Il, however, it is at least coherent, so kudos to Saddam for that. And as the butcher of the Kurds outlines the attributes of a good leader (wise, kind, humble, close to the people) it's interesting to speculate: was this how he perceived himself? I suspect it is. Few among us consciously believe we are wicked. When Saddam did evil he probably told himself it was for the greater good. Dictators, like the rest of us, have an infinite capacity for self-deception.
Zabiba and the King was an instant bestseller in Iraq. There was a musical. Saddam wrote two more novels. But soon after reading Zabiba, I found that the details were rapidly fading from memory. Like the crumbling statue of Ozymandias, a mere two "trunkless legs of stone" remained:
1. The translator's late and repeated use of the term "asshole" to describe Zabiba's husband, after pages and pages of arid anti-prose.
2. The description of bestiality in northern Iraq, a sudden eruption of interspecies lust after an entire book dedicated to the most non-sexual romance ever. Behold:
Even an animal respects a man's desire, if it wants to copulate with him. Doesn't a female bear try to please a herdsman when she drags him into the mountains as it happens in the North of Iraq? She drags him into her den, so that he, obeying her desire, would copulate with her? Doesn't she bring him nuts, gathering them from the trees or picking them from the bushes? Doesn't she climb into the houses of farmers in order to steal some cheese, nuts and even raisins, so that she can feed the man and awake in him the desire to have her?
Well, no, she doesn't. The translator suggests that the bear is a metaphor for Russia, but Russia is not Iraq's neighbour to the north. Perhaps Saddam was a fan of Peter Hoeg's astonishingly poor The Woman and the Ape and figured he'd add a bit of man-beast love for postmodern frisson. Or perhaps Saddam slipped the bear-sex bit in as a test, to see if anybody was actually reading the thing.
Yes, I can see the scene now. Late at night, after a few glasses of whisky in whatever palace he was inhabiting that week, Saddam would kick back with Tariq Aziz and Chemical Ali and all those other faces from days of yore:
"So, did you like the book?" he'd ask.
"Oh yes, master" they'd reply, "It's a modern classic."
"You enjoyed the dialogues on leadership?"
"Wonderful, master! So profound!"
"... and what about the bit when I talk about bears shagging farmers?"
And O! The fear he'd see in their eyes.
